A couple of words from Chuck (Sculptured Software)

[Benighted]

I have a habit of hunting down developers of some of my favoruite games. Here is a couple of words from Chuck Peavey that used to work in Sculptured Software. He did the excellent Loderunner port amongst others. We're discussing porting games from disk to cartridge for the XE.

 

"Peter Adams was one of the founders. Hal Rushton was a producer when I started and later split off his own company with Les (don't remember Les's last name) I remember Les was an artist.

If you can find Hal Rushton, you can probably find your answers about the Mario game. He was the best producer they had and he really knew his stuff as well, he knew everything that was going on so he would probably know who did the programming on Mario Brothers.

I tried to change Wikipedia to list the games I worked on. Some guy changed them back. He claimed he didn't know me so I must not have worked at Sculptured. I don't know enough about Wikipedia to argue with him so I didn't bother worrying about it but of course he didn't know me, he worked there around 1996, I was there from 1986 to about 1990.

There weren't to many games we couldn't get into cartridge. The problems mostly came because you couldn't write to a cartridge. When we ported games we were sent code from another platform. Sometimes it was apple, sometimes Commodore and sometimes Atari. Most of the Atari ports were easy, except some required the code to allow changes to memory close to where the code was and you couldn't have that in a cartridge so the code needed moved.

Often the code was from the Apple and while they both used 6502 Assembly Language, everything else was different so you'd need to change ports and how the code would be written. Apple didn't have sprites so you had to work with that. One on One basketball was an apple port.

As for compiling and testing... at first we were writing directly on the Apple. Everyone had their favorite method and platform. I bought an Atari ST and a cross compiler that would do 6502 Assembly. Then I built a little box that would connect the printer port on the ST to the joystick ports of the XE. I would compile the code on the ST, dump it into the XE and test my code.

This was a lot faster. Before that, a compile would take nearly an hour.

I hope that helps."